This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Loralee Nicolay was a bright-eyed sophomore studying art at Utah State University in Logan when she met Ray Bradbury.
"He just seemed a sweet old man, so happy to be signing books for students," said Nicolay, today a 35-year-old stay-at-home Murray parent and part-time interior designer and artist.
The occasion was Nicolay's winning T-shirt design, inspired by Bradbury's 1951 story collection, The Illustrated Man. The prize for her first-place design, selected by Bradbury himself, was time spent beside the world-famous science-fiction and fantasy writer, author of The Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine.
The Dec. 1, 1995, day progressed blandly, Nicolay remembers. Bradbury gave a short speech to students stressing the importance of carrying "a mad enthusiasm about each day." But the man himself, then 75, was calm and quiet. The tension and mystery at the heart of his most famous books and stories never peeked through.
After his visit, Nicolay picked up her old high-school copy of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Reading it a second time, about a future where readers are outlaws and books are burned by state "firemen" while the human imagination languishes under endless hours of television, she was reminded once more how the full power of Bradbury's personality resided in his stories.
"After that I purposely lived without a television for 12 years," Nicolay said. "It really shook me. I started taking all his books more to heart."
Bradbury's death Tuesday in Los Angeles at age 91 shook millions who read his best-selling works, including well-known fantasy and science-fiction authors with Utah connections.
"I doubt you can find an author writing science fiction or fantasy today who wasn't in some way influenced by the stories of this powerful man," said Brandon Sanderson, author of the best-selling Mistborn series of fantasy novels, via email. "He will be missed."
Sanderson lives in American Fork and studied literature at Brigham Young University while writing first drafts of his novels and working night shifts in Provo hotels. Bradbury was among the first authors he read growing up, Sanderson said, adding the author "was a genius."
Bradbury was inspired in part by a hardscrabble childhood during which he suffering nightmares and spent endless hours in libraries reading books his working-class family could rarely afford. He went on to create whole worlds and milieus in which Martians read the minds of Earthlings in The Martian Chronicles, written in 1950, and laughter is used as a weapon against an evil carnival barker in his 1962 book Something Wicked This Way Comes.
"It was only natural when I was 12 that I decided to become a writer and laid out a huge roll of butcher paper to begin scribbling an endless tale that scrolled right on up to Now, never guessing that the butcher paper would run forever," Bradbury told Barnaby Conrad and Monte Schulz for their 2002 book, Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life.
Bradbury laid the template for so many other writers to follow, Orson Scott Card said. "Bradbury took the losses and loneliness of his childhood and turned them into stories of memory, hope, exuberance, and life," Card wrote via email from his home in Greensboro, N.C. "But there was always an undercurrent of dread — the constant possibility of losing things that you can't imagine losing, from the ancestral home to every bone in your body."
Card graduated from the University of Utah and Brigham Young University, where he studied poetry and theater. The Nebula and Hugo Award-winning author of such best-sellers as Ender's Game was busy Wednesday finishing an essay on Bradbury for National Review.
Bradbury received the National Medal of Arts in 2004 from President George W. Bush, although never a Nobel or Pulitzer Prize. French director François Truffaut adapted Fahrenheit 451 into a tony 1966 film version, but without the "Mechanical Hound" character that made the book more frightening.
Nicolay said she still jokes with her family that Bradbury owned one of her "paintings," even if it was hanging in her closet. With the Internet and social media networks having achieved such popularity in today's world, she said there's a relevant serious core at the center of books such as Fahrenheit 451.
"I'm kind of hoping his death might spark renewed interest in his work, and that people might turn off their devices and read a book or, who knows, have a real conversation with someone," Nicolay said. "All his work has that underlying theme. Just last year I broke down and bought a television. I can tell you this, I was happier without it."
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